PCBDet: An Efficient Deep Neural Network Object Detection Architecture
for Automatic PCB Component Detection on the Edge
Abstract
There can be numerous electronic components on a given PCB, making the
task of visual inspection to detect defects very time-consuming and
prone to error, especially at scale. There has thus been significant
interest in automatic PCB component detection, particularly leveraging
deep learning. However, deep neural networks typically require high
computational resources, possibly limiting their feasibility in
real-world use cases in manufacturing, which often involve high-volume
and high-throughput detection with constrained edge computing resource
availability. As a result of an exploration of efficient deep neural
network architectures for this use case, we introduce PCBDet, an
attention condenser network design that provides state-of-the-art
inference throughput while achieving superior PCB component detection
performance compared to other state-of-the-art efficient architecture
designs. Experimental results show that PCBDet can achieve up to 2×
inference speed-up on an ARM Cortex A72 processor when compared to an
EfficientNet-based design while achieving ∼2-4% higher mAP on the
FICS-PCB benchmark dataset.